The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Personal computer interfaces since the Xerox Alto, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows on PCs have adopted a user interface based upon a mouse moving a cursor on the screen to select and directly manipulate user interface elements, including buttons, menus, forms, and graphical representations of the underlying concepts being controlled. Later extensions include additional buttons, a scroll-wheel for managing a larger canvas on a smaller display, and a large variety of different forms of mouse, including track wheels, nipple joysticks (typically embedded between the G and H keys on a laptop), or touchpads.
However, consumer electronics (CE) video devices such as video tape recorders, DVD players, CD players, and other devices that are often used in a living room or family room, and are operated from a short distance away using a remote control, have typically followed a “left-right-up-down-select” user interface paradigm, where the remote control is able to move a focus highlight from one control to the next on the screen, where the screen hotspots are pre-programmed by the interface designer (for example, the DVD authoring content producer).
The Sonos music controller interoperates with and controls a CE device that has no display, and the remote-control is linked by bi-directional wireless channel, and has an LCD screen to show the current selection.